In Sid We Trust?

[Gliese 581]

I think civ2 was probably the best entry in the franchise. It definately had alot of flaws that most players today would find unacceptable, but it was the biggest improvement over its predecessor while introducing the least new flaws. Civ3 and civ4 made some good improvements over their respective predecessors, but both of them also introduced a host of new problems (eg the SOD) or new absurdities (eg suicide catapults or Confucian Vikings).

You seem to really hate the wrong religion stuff. There's an option to choose religion which helps a bit, but I'm sure you know that.
So why do you find religion so bothersome? There's lots of other features that doesn't correspond to the real world. Map unless you play exclusively earth map, alliances formed between real world enemies, civs from different time periods in game simultaneously, known techs making no sense and so on. Isn't that all part of simulating an alternate history?

 

[frekk]

You seem to really hate the wrong religion stuff. There's an option to choose religion which helps a bit, but I'm sure you know that.

Yeah, but it's frustrating too, because the only appropriate one might already be taken. Or there might not even be an appropriate one available at all. Plus, it doesn't stop the AI Vikings from being Buddhist.

So why do you find religion so bothersome?

I don't find the concept itself bad, I just find some of the implementation poor. I was hoping they'd fix it, something along the lines that some of the more recent mods (like the schisms mod) have been trying to do, rather than just scrapping it. But I can live without it, too.

There's lots of other features that doesn't correspond to the real world. Map unless you play exclusively earth map, alliances formed between real world enemies, civs from different time periods in game simultaneously, known techs making no sense and so on. Isn't that all part of simulating an alternate history?

Oh sure. There are lots of things that are ... odd. But most of them are critical elements of the game. I can't see any reason why it's necessary that my Vikings or Aztecs or Persians or whoever are stuck with religions that fit rather awkwardly and are pretty difficult to imagine. It could've been done much differently.

For instance, you could have religions deriving their name from the civ that founded them (eg, if India founds a religion, it gets called "Hinduism") and derive their unit and building styles from the cultural artstyle of the founding civ. Or something. It could have been done better; as it was, it was very awkward and really threatened my suspension of disbelief.

 

[Thyrwyn]

I agree with frekk on the religion thing. The implementation was broken on too many levels (not even getting into the cultural incongruities) and overall it was far too important. On large maps the income potential for possessing a holy city was too obscene to ignore; Since spreading your religion to your neighbors was also important for diplomacy, you were rewarded twice for doing the same thing.

Islam and Taoism were especially problematic - they come too late (at least at the slower speeds). When was the last time either of them were significant religions in a game you played?

I was also disappointed that effects of having the same religion were always positive - some of the worst wars in history were fought between factions of the "same" religion.

 

[eleazzaar]

Lets' put it this way.

I trust Firaxis more than any other group to make a good strategy game. They have a better chance than any to top the best 4X strategy game ever.

Though i really wish they would remake Alpha Centari...

 

[Thyrwyn]

'Course the whole 'living planet' thing will just seem like a rip off of Avatar, now. Hmmm...there's an idea for a mod. . .

 

[kivanc]

the changes that are mentioned always in the first part of any interview: hexes and 1upt. i am sure these will require great concentration in coding and will take an important ratio of firaxis civ5 workforce.

1upt seems like a hasty solution for SoD and suicide catapults weirdnesses. i am quite skeptical about 1upt.
hexes seem fine but still cannot be called as a step forward. not a very big deal in gameplay, it is superficial.

civ5 will have some more changes (city states, social policies, tech sharing etc.) which aren't explained in detail.

shortly; of course i will buy the game, i wonder about it so much. but i am not sure whether it will be a step forward in the saga.

 

[Shurdus]

Meh... Now the combat will be more interesting, which is nice. Still we fight over control of the land, hexes or squares do not change that aspect of the game. Also apparently measures have been taken to make sure that city spamming does not occur, because spamming cities will have drawbacks. Also fighting is drawn away from bick stacks, and now it is more important to defend not just your cities but also your land.

There is a lot to like it seems. I think it will be a step up, although there will be some functions of Civ IV that may be changes in ways we may not like. Whatever may be of that, I sure the new game will be very enjoyable once we are used to the changes. I did not think Civ IV was all that amazing either until I finally understood the finer details.

 

[kivanc]

"combat will be more interesting". that's what firaxis had to say. let's see... still 1upt seems so childish, jon seems to be confused civ with a "risk" game.

spamming cities have drawbacks? yes because firaxis don't want us to play on large maps and build many cities because they know the game would crash if we do so. civ4 works sooooo slow.
that is their solution to game slowness. if they let us build as many cities as we want (as we did in civ2 and civ3) the game would crash.

 

[Shurdus]

"combat will be more interesting". that's what firaxis had to say. let's see... still 1upt seems so childish, jon seems to be confused civ with a "risk" game.

spamming cities have drawbacks? yes because firaxis don't want us to play on large maps and build many cities because they know the game would crash if we do so. civ4 works sooooo slow.
that is their solution to game slowness. if they let us build as many cities as we want (as we did in civ2 and civ3) the game would crash.

If you feel like complaining about the stability and performance of the game there are several places to do it. In a thread where something completely else is discussed is not one of those places.

 

[Thyrwyn]

. . .especially since none of the things you are complaining about (eg: fewer cities, smaller maps) have been confirmed or even hinted at.

 

[Wolle68]

"combat will be more interesting". that's what firaxis had to say. let's see... still 1upt seems so childish, jon seems to be confused civ with a "risk" game.

I've played a couple of 1upt + hex strategy games, and I think that the combat is a lot more interesting in those. Some people here have played a lot of those and seem to agree.

Why would it be childish What children's games are you thinking about? Certainly not Risk, which is nothing like that.

spamming cities have drawbacks? yes because firaxis don't want us to play on large maps and build many cities because they know the game would crash if we do so. civ4 works sooooo slow.
that is their solution to game slowness. if they let us build as many cities as we want (as we did in civ2 and civ3) the game would crash.

Sounds like you have forgotten about the Infinite City Sprawl strategy. That was really lame, and ruined a lot of the game for me.

 

[kivanc]

Sounds like you have forgotten about the Infinite City Sprawl strategy. That was really lame, and ruined a lot of the game for me.

you can move up level if u want.

. . .especially since none of the things you are complaining about (eg: fewer cities, smaller maps) have been confirmed or even hinted at.

civ5 will have less cities and a smaller world. i cannot prove it but i bet on that. they are just hiding the truth. civ4 had less cities and smaller world than civ3 and nobody officially declared that before the publishment. i was very disappointed about it while i first saw the game but i still play the game for 4 years. and i like it more than civ3, because it has other positive sides.
i think the world scale and less cities will be a negative side of civ5.

so i am fond of the game for 17years but i am just not as much optimistic as 90% of you are.



and 1upt is childish, yes. i like civ and i also like SM's railroads. but i don't want a combo of these 2 games. they have seperate tastes for me. so are risk and civ. i want them to be seperate 1upt will change the game dramatically and most probably in a bad way.

maybe 1upt will bring good strategy in the game but sure, it will be a quite different game big companies with a high profile don't do such big changes.
1 of the main reasons for the high popularity of football is that, its rules don't change dramatically since ~150years.
so 1upt itself may not be childish, but making such a big change in the game is quite childish and not even close to professionalism.

if u accept 1upt so easily, maybe you will also not say anything if they change food/hammer/commerce system in civ6.

 

[Shurdus]

So now you have not even seen the new system and you have not felt how it worked out, yet you can say that the new system is childish? It seems to me like you are just afraid of changes. They may have changed the way combat works in Civ V, but then again the combat in Civ was never really one of the strong points. In Civ IV I think the warring is very poor, even though I think the promotions were a nice touch. In Civ V I hope they will have brushed up the boring combat a little bit. I am unsure if it will work in a brilliant way, but it will require more thinking than it did in Civ IV. This alone will make the combat in V more exciting. Add to that the fact that you now need to defend your land and not just your cities and it is clear to me that the combat will be more engaging and less generic than in previous installments of Civ.

As to the childish comments, I am unsure how the 1upt and risk are similar. Risk has no connection to CIv whatsoever. The new system does not mimic Risk in any way. Also I do not understand why companies with high profiles should make no changes to games. Also I do not think the appeal of football has anything to do with the rles, and for your information the rules of football have changes a lot over the past few years. Offside was changed a few times, now goalies can no longer take a ball into their hands if it comes from the foot of their own defender, the booking system was changed since pulling of your shirt is now an automatic yellow card, etc. Your statements therefore obviously do not make a lot of sense, and at the very least they are not based on facts.

Sure it will be sad if they should change the hammer food and commerce system too, but then again that system is means to an end. I think it worked fine so it deserves to be there in the next game as well, but if they changed it to something else you would not see me crying over it, as long as the new system would be similar in usefulness.

 

[kivanc]

So now you have not even seen the new system and you have not felt how it worked out, yet you can say that the new system is childish? It seems to me like you are just afraid of changes. They may have changed the way combat works in Civ V, but then again the combat in Civ was never really one of the strong points. In Civ IV I think the warring is very poor, even though I think the promotions were a nice touch. In Civ V I hope they will have brushed up the boring combat a little bit. I am unsure if it will work in a brilliant way, but it will require more thinking than it did in Civ IV. This alone will make the combat in V more exciting. Add to that the fact that you now need to defend your land and not just your cities and it is clear to me that the combat will be more engaging and less generic than in previous installments of Civ.

As to the childish comments, I am unsure how the 1upt and risk are similar. Risk has no connection to CIv whatsoever. The new system does not mimic Risk in any way. Also I do not understand why companies with high profiles should make no changes to games. Also I do not think the appeal of football has anything to do with the rles, and for your information the rules of football have changes a lot over the past few years. Offside was changed a few times, now goalies can no longer take a ball into their hands if it comes from the foot of their own defender, the booking system was changed since pulling of your shirt is now an automatic yellow card, etc. Your statements therefore obviously do not make a lot of sense, and at the very least they are not based on facts.

Sure it will be sad if they should change the hammer food and commerce system too, but then again that system is means to an end. I think it worked fine so it deserves to be there in the next game as well, but if they changed it to something else you would not see me crying over it, as long as the new system would be similar in usefulness.

first of all, i said making a big change like 1upt is childish, i didn't say 1upt strategy is childish. i said it would be a different game, not civ.
little changes of football in 150! years is much less civ changes already.

i am not afraid of any reasonable changes that's why i played all civ games and also smac, ctp but i don't like such big changes. if i need big changes, i just go play anotehr game.

civ4's combat system was poor? i don't think so but well, just remove SoD and do sth similar to old civs. that is not a reason to bring 1upt.

i really feel some of you guys just try hard to like the game. you will like it whatever it will be.
i respect civ saga as i've been playing it a lot but i am not over optimistic. i am objective.

 

[mjs0]

I'm not sure trust is the right word, but I am confident that the designers/developers at Firaxis will have thought about the structure of the entire game before making some of the substantial changes we are hearing about. I am really looking forward to hearing what else they have changed, we have heard almost nothing about the non-ancient periods of the game for example.

On the subject of why they may have experimented and then stuck with 1UPT. (Even with PG as the initial source of the idea I am sure they would not have persisted if early prototypes proved 'unfun'.)
It seems to me that, when creating the unit/military AI, having any sort of military unit per tile number other than 1 or infinite adds significantly to the complexity if one expects good unit planning from the AI.

With infinite stacking the AI can move any number of military units into a tile without having to rethink anything, with 1UPT the AI has a choice of military units to move to a tile once it has chosen the strategic/tactical use for the tile.
If you give it some intermediate value (e.g. 5) then to behave well the AI has to not only choose military units to move to that tile but maintain a balance of military units that makes the stack viable on the battlefield.

Based on this thinking it is my guess that we should get a much better performing military AI with the 1UPT limit in place than we could have gotten with any other stacking limit.

Reducing the complexity of the calculations for the AI is a key variable in determining the size of map that can be supported. If they have made other similar smart high-level decisions in areas such as pathfinding and trade routes the ability to effectively code the AI at the low-level to be performant enough to support large maps should be much improved.

I do not have specific experience with game AI (although I have been involved in the creation of real-time expert systems that have to determine multiple courses of action from massive volumes of data) so I would be interested in the opinion of those more knowledgeable in the field.

 

[kivanc]

5upt could be fine. it wouldn't change combat system so huge.

 

[Shurdus]

5upt could be fine. it wouldn't change combat system so huge.

And there we are, back into talking nonsense...

In a game where one may very well have 100+ units, you now say that it would not change combat too much if they had a 5upt rule? I can and will stack 100+ units in a tile if the need arises, and you claim that going from that to 5upt is not huge? Please...

 

[Thormodr]

ICS was lame as it was the best strategy. The bigger you got, the better you got. You became a steamroller that nobody could stop. Trust me, I used to love ICSing but I am fully aware how cheesy it was.

Curbing that and unit spam are good things. Firaxis should be commended.

 

[kivanc]

And there we are, back into talking nonsense...

In a game where one may very well have 100+ units, you now say that it would not change combat too much if they had a 5upt rule? I can and will stack 100+ units in a tile if the need arises, and you claim that going from that to 5upt is not huge? Please...

first of all, we don't have to yalk the way you like

and then, for 5upt, u still can keep multi units in a tile.

and 100upt is not practical.
20-30 is the number u probably see most. i don't stack more than 10 neither

 

[luke2345]

sid